Late March Update

I was experimenting with growing my own oyster mushrooms a couple of months ago. I used coco coir and coffee grounds as my substrate and the mycelium covered the surface nicely. Then one day, I left the greenhouse dome lid cracked open a bit and I guess the fresh air caused them to pop up and fruit. The first photo is from when I first notice them and the second is about 10 hours later or so. These things grow fast!!

Woke up to see them like this

Roughly 10 hours later, they got BIG!

Here is my late entry for What I Ate Wednesday.
There's been a lot of talk in the Paleosphere lately about pork. There's some evidence that suggests pork is safer to eat once it has been marinated or cured. Kudos for bacon, right?? You can read about it in the Weston A Price Foundation's article: How Does Pork Prepared in Various Ways Affect the Blood? To me, this evidence is inconclusive. I won't call it junk science, but their sample size is too small in my opinion. I do however hope that this introduces further discussion and more research on the matter. Since I never really like the taste of plain farmed pork anyways, it's easy to buy into the marinating/curing idea. It doesn't take much convincing for me that cured bacon is better than plain ol' fresh pork. A couple of weeks ago I tried curing my own pork belly into bacon and then smoked it over hickory, it turned out very tasty! I'll do it again soon and write up how it goes. As for marinating, I decided to try that experiment the other night. I marinated a few pork chops in apple cider vinegar and seasoning for almost 24 hours before tossing them on the grill. I didn't have any veggies planned for dinner, luckily there's plenty of stuff growing in my aquaponics system right now.

Frying some fresh picked kale and chard in butter, soy sauce, olive oil, and sherry.

Grabbed some mixed greens from my salad table.
Everything from my backyard, except for the pork chops.. they were grown at Costco!

The verdict: not good, I'm sad to say. I just didn't like the tasty of apple cider vinegar with the pork. It wasn't bad, just not good. I'll be looking for other marinate recipes for pork chops that involve something more palatable than apple cider vinegar.



Events coming soon :

It's almost time for the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour. They have a terrible website, but the tour is great non-the-less. Go check out some cool chicken coops around Austin if you are thinking about getting into chickens! fccooptour.blogspot.com


Speaking of coop tours, there is a new one called "Hill Country Coop Tour" that is about a month after the Funky tour. It'll be on May 5th and mostly up in N/W Austin, such as Cedar Park, Liberty Hill, and Leander. They don't have a website yet but maybe they will be posting more details on their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/292393660808736/?ref=ts

 Jack Ingram will be playing a free show on Wednesday April 4th at the Nutty Brown Cafe as part of the KVET Texas Music Series.


Speaking of music, Shinedown has a new album due in five days. I've sampled all of their new songs and I'm having mixed opinions. I do need to listen to all of the whole songs when the album comes out, but I'm thinking it may not be as good as their previous albums. I could be speaking too early, though. Their last album was fantastic and I was unsure of how it would turn out before it was released as well. We'll see. I'm excited about it though!

Here's the music video for the first single, Bully: